64
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 8, 2014
PROFILES
THE ART OF CONVERSATION
The curator who talked his way to the top.
BYD.T.MAX
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator at the
Serpentine, a gallery in London's
Kensington Gardens that was once a
teahouse and is now firmly established as
a center for contemporary art. A few
years ago, ArtReview named him the
most powerful figure in the field, but
Obrist, a forty-six-year-old Swiss, seems
less to stand atop the art world than to
race around, up, over, and through it. On
weekdays, he works at the Serpentine
o ces; there are meetings over budgets
and fund-raising, and Obrist, with his
fellow-director, Julia Peyton-Jones, se-
lects artists to exhibit and helps them
shape their shows. When I visited him in
London in late August, two exhibitions
that he had organized were up: "512
hours," a "durational performance" piece
by Marina Abramović, and a show of
computer-generated video art by Ed At-
kins. But on weekends Obrist becomes
who he truly is: a traveller. By his count,
he has made roughly two thousand trips
in the past twenty years, and while in
London I discovered that he had been
away fifty of the previous fifty-two week-
ends. He goes to meet emerging artists
and check in with old ones, to see shows
small and large. The kind of culture he
cares about is mobile and far-flung and
can be grasped better on the move. He
likes to quote J. G. Ballard's claim that the
most beautiful building in London is the
Hilton Hotel at Heathrow Airport, and
the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha's
observation that "in-betweenness is a
fundamental condition of our times."
Obrist is enormously fond of quoting.
On the twelve weekends before I saw
him in London, H.U.O., as Obrist is
known, had been in Basel, for the art fair;
Ronchamp, France, for a wedding, in the
chapel designed by Le Corbusier; Mu-
nich, for a talk with Matthew Barney;
Berlin, where he maintains an apartment
primarily to house ten thousand books,
for an interview with Rosemarie Trockel;
Frankfurt, for a panel with Peter Fischli;
Arles, where he is helping to design a
new museum; Singapore, to meet emerg-
ing artists; Munich again, to interview
the young Estonian artist Katja No-
vitskova; Los Angeles, for a panel on art
and Instagram; Vienna, to guest-curate
an exhibit of unrealized design projects;
Majorca, to see Miquel Barceló's ceramic
murals in the cathedral; Edinburgh,
where Obrist's new memoir, "Ways
of Curating," was featured at the book
fair; and Vancouver, where he appeared
onstage with the novelist and futurist
Douglas Coupland. In all these locales,
he saw as much art as he could, but he
also visited scientists and historians. He
believes that, because culture is becoming
more interconnected across geography
and across disciplines, his knowledge
must expand far beyond the visual arts:
to technology, literature, anthropology,
cultural criticism, philosophy. These
disciplines, in turn, become tools in
Obrist's attempt to fertilize the arts with
fresh ideas.
Another thing that Obrist loves to do
is talk. His favorite word is "urgent," to
which he gives an elongated Mitteleuro-
pean pronunciation. His words come out
in an almost comical torrent, citations
bobbing up and ideas colliding. Again
quoting Ballard, he describes his curato-
rial work as "junction-making"---be-
tween objects, between people, and be-
tween people and objects. Words help
Obrist process what he's seeing, and he
often channels this energy into inter-
views with artists and cultural figures,
which he calls "salons of the twenty-first
century." He has conducted twenty-four
hundred hours of interviews to date,
talking to artists in their studios, on
planes, or as they walk. Ideally, he records
them using three digital recorders, to
make sure that nothing gets lost.
In interviews, Obrist's volubility is
paired with a deep deference. The archi-
tect Rem Koolhaas, in a preface to the
Obrist compendium "dontstopdontstop-
dontstop," writes, "Usually those a icted
with logorrhea do not stimulate others
to communicate; in his case, he rushes to
let others do the talking." Obrist respects
the art-world compact that though the
work may be shocking, the conversation
should be supportive. His questions are
rarely personal, and when he is being in-
terviewed himself he is similarly guarded:
at one point, when I asked him to explain
his manic personality, he said, "Maybe I'm
in a permanent state of Pessoa's intran-
quillity." The interviews, over time, be-
come books. He has published forty vol-
umes of them, records of interactions
with everyone from Doris Lessing to the
video artist Ryan Trecartin. In all, they
represent Obrist's best claim to being an
artist in his own right. He likes to say that
he models himself on the impresario Ser-
gei Diaghilev.
Obrist is not interested in all art
equally. He can be skeptical about paint-
ing, because at this point, he told me, it's
di cult to do meaningful work in that
medium. For him, art, even old art, must
be speaking to something current. "I
don't wake up in the morning and think
about Franz Kline," he said.The art he is
most passionate about doesn't hang on
walls and often doesn't have a permanent
emanation. It can take the form of a
dance or a game or a science experiment,
and often leaves nothing behind but
memories and an exhibition catalogue.
(Obrist has published more than two
hundred catalogues.) He looks for work
that responds to the current moment or
anticipates the moment after this one---
Obrist is obsessed with the not-yet-done.
His favorite question is "Do you have any
unfinished or unrealized projects?"
Much of the work that fits Obrist's
Hans Ulrich Obrist has conducted twenty-four hundred hours of interviews with creative people: "salons of the twenty-first century."